As part of my day to day working and reading I often come across useful tips and tools which I  add to my Delicious bookmarks. I share these automatically in the right  hand bar of this site. From time to time I will highlight some of the best and  most useful of these links.

Use JavaScript to move items between two select lists

Html multiple selects are probably the most unfriendly form elements in the html specification as they provide no visual clues on how to interact with them. By applying some JavaScript however you can use them to create an intuitive user experience for selecting  multiple values. The link below will take you to a nice tutorial with code samples and downloads that can easily be integrated with some CSS and back end scripting to produce a powerful select control.

http://www.mredkj.com/tutorials/tutorial_mixed2b.html

Fixing your footer with CSS

One of the most frustrating aspects of CSS based layout is getting the footer of a site to stick to the bottom of the page no matter the screen size or content on the page. This link will take you to a great article that describes how to achieve this in a cross-browser friendly way. It even works with IE6.

http://fortysevenmedia.com/blog/archives/making_your_footer_stay_put_with_css/

Fixed table headers

Tables are an essential tool for displaying data in web applications but can become difficult to understand and interpret if you have to scroll down to see lots of data. By fixing the header if a table in place and just scrolling the data your tabular data will be far more user friendly and easier to understand.  The example located at this link will show you how to achieve this by applying some CSS to your table header and body.

http://www.imaputz.com/cssStuff/bigFourVersion.html

Toggle visibility of a page element

Some times you  need to make the display of information optional . This link illustrates a number of methods to do this.

http://www.dustindiaz.com/seven-togglers/

Maximum and Minimum height and width support in Internet Explorer

IE6 doesn’t support them and IE 7 only supports them when you declare a strict DocType. This article describes how you can use some proprietary IE features to simulate these incredibly useful features.

http://perishablepress.com/press/2007/01/16/maximum-and-minimum-height-and-width-in-internet-explorer

Test your PHP regular expressions

Regular expressions are a powerful programming tool . I’ve used many test platforms when creating regular expressions but for designing expressions for use with PHP’s  regular expression functions this tool rocks.

http://www.spaweditor.com/scripts/regex/index.php

Do you have a useful tool or tip you’d like to share? Why not add a link into the commonts of this post.